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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Let us now examine the principal objections put forth against communism. Most of them are evidently caused by a simple misunderstanding, yet they raise important questions and merit our attention.
It is not for us to answer the objections raised by authoritarian communism – we ourselves hold with them. Civilized nations have suffered too much in the long, hard struggle for the emancipation of the individual, to disown their past work and to tolerate a government that would make itself felt in the smallest details of a citizen's life, even if that government had no other aim than the good of the community. Should an authoritarian socialist society ever succeed in establishing itself, it could not last; general discontent would soon force it to break up, or to reorganize itself on principles of liberty.
It is of an anarchist-communist society we are about to speak, a society that recognizes the absolute liberty of the individual, that does not admit of any authority, and makes use of no compulsion to drive men to work. Limiting our studies to the economic side of the question, let us see if such a society, composed of men as they are today, neither better nor worse, neither more nor less industrious, would have a chance of successful development.
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